Unreality Check: From Kim to Kim in North Korea

Mandatory public crying. Those three words sum up about as tidily as possible the ghastly bondage—the incessant psychic and physical torture—that the Kim dynasty has made the North Korean way of life for more than half a century. No sooner did the state news agency release the news of Kim Jong-il’s death than the public plazas of Pyongyang began to fill with neatly assembled ranks of citizens, weeping and wailing on command, while state television recorded the spectacle, which was promptly uploaded to YouTube. Early in the most heavily circulated clip, the fakeness of the grieving is obvious: you can see the captive mourners forcing the sobs, moaning unconvincingly, and squeezing their eyes to produce tears. But by about half way through the clip, the atmosphere of absolute bereavement looks real: men and women prostrate themselves, writhing and howling in what appears to be acute and authentic agony. Here in the space of just a few minutes of videotape we see the method and the madness of the Kims’ grim dominion over North Korea enacted in miniature—we watch a lie become reality.

When he was running for President, George W. Bush mistook the third syllable of the late Kim’s name for a roman numeral and called him Kim Jong Two. Bush, of course, knew something about dynasties, and the gaffe was not illogical. The hell of North Korea was the invention of the first Kim, Kim Il-sung, who remained the omnipotent national figure—officially, “president for eternity”—even after he died and his son took over. In state propaganda, Kim Il-sung was known as “the perfect brain,” while Kim Jong-il was merely “the central brain.” (Years before Kim Jong-il came to power, the North Korean Academy of Social Sciences altered the definition of hereditary rule in its “Dictionary of Political Terminologies,” removing the phrases “a reactionary custom of exploitative societies,” “originally a product of slave societies,” “adopted by feudal lords as a means to perpetuate dictatorial rule.”) And, as Kim Jong-il perpetuated the criminal syndicate of his father’s rule, it was never entirely clear whether he was functioning as its product or its producer. In 2003, in a lengthy report for the magazine on the horrible weirdness of North Korea—its history, its ideology, its brutality, and the stories of its defectors—I wrote,

In North Korea, however, the truth has never been a matter of fact so much as an expression of the Kims’ whim—father and son. The great preponderance of this so-called truth is a confection of outright lies—not merely false but, more perniciously, a form of unreality, imposed with such relentlessness and violence on a people hermetically sealed from any alternative sources of information that it has become their only reality. A North Korean who does not believe the state’s every claim is left with the void of dumb disbelief, for it is impossible in Kim Il Sung Nation—as the North is sometimes described in its own proclamations—to find anything else to believe in. “The people are my god,” Kim Il Sung said, but it is before his towering statues that the people bow down and weep, his name that they must not take in vain, and his teachings that they must live by—even now—lest they be destroyed…. Who, in such an order, could dare to speak, or even know, his own mind?

The photographer Tomas van Houtryve spent a good part of the past year documenting the plight of North Korean refugees who flee into China, and when I spoke with him recently in a podcast for the Magnum Emergency Fund, he made it clear that nothing in North Korea has changed for the better since I did my reporting.

To the outside world, it has always been easier to mock North Korea’s craziness than to fathom its horror, even as an estimated two to three million people died there of starvation in the late nineteen-nineties, and a generation of children were stunted by extreme malnutrition. (Even when Westerners took Kim Jong-il seriously, they tended to treat him as a punchline. The Economist depicted him on its cover under the headline, “Greetings Earthlings,” and President Bush called him “a pygmy” who acted like “a spoiled child at a dinner table” and was “starving his own people” in “a Gulag the size of Houston.”) Kim Jong-il made the mockery easy. Shin Sang-ok, a South Korean film director who was kidnapped and held captive for years by the North Korean dictator, told me that Kim adored Rambo, James Bond, and Friday the 13th movies. But, Shin said: “He doesn’t know what fiction is. He looks at these movies as if they were records of reality.”

But what has always made North Korea really frightening is that, from within its own twisted worldview, Pyongyang behaves rationally. Never has such a small, economically weak state succeeded in making such a big deal of itself for so long. One of the main reasons for North Korea’s endurance is that South Korea is terrified of its collapse. Although the Korean War has never officially ended—and more than eleven million Korean families remain divided by the partition of the Korean peninsula—it has been Seoul’s policy for several decades now to try to prevent a North Korean implosion rather than to promote one. Why? Because South Korea, having watched West Germany pay for the integration of the former-Communist East Germany, is terrified of the cost that integrating the blighted North would entail. So our great ally in East Asia is complicit in propping up our great enemy there.

The North Korean state kept the news of Kim Jong Il’s death secret for nearly fifty hours before issuing the announcement that he had succumbed, at last, to “overwork.” By then Kim Jong Un had been officially promoted to the rank of “Great Successor”—a giant step up from his previous handle, “Brilliant Comrade.” Very little is known about this new Kim, but from what can be surmised he does not represent any prospect of relief for his subjects. There are more forces at work in the North Korean state than the Kims, but just how they work—and whether the Kims run the state or the state runs the Kims—is a matter of speculation to outsiders. There is talk today among Korea watchers of inevitable purges at the higher echelons of the ruling apparatus, to secure the filial succession of power, and there is talk of power struggles between the military and the Party.

About the only thing certain is that Pyongyang does not want us to know what’s going on. Lest there be any confusion about that, the North Korean military today test-fired a short-range missile, a gesture to the outside world universally interpreted by masters of diplomatic sign-language as meaning, Back off—it’s business as usual here. So, for all the falsehood and bad acting on display in the videos of the people of Pyongyang working themselves up, on command, into a frenzy of lamentation this morning, the fact is that North Koreans have every reason to be in grief today. It is not because the Kims die, but because their order survives, that the nation is bereft.

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995, and a staff writer since 1997.